Lessons from my father: ‘Be happy, be brave’

Kristine Sydney

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Lessons from my father: ‘Be happy, be brave’
'This Father’s Day weekend, I think about the stories about risk-taking and marriage that he explicitly taught us'

My dad admired my late grandfather, a kind man with hot integrity and smiling eyes. His role model for fatherhood, my dad loved from a distance. My grandfather was a soldier and then, an OFW contractor in Guam until he retired and, at that point, my dad was already living abroad in Saudi Arabia with his family.

I imagine my dad as a young boy taking notes on how to be a man from a soldier who survived the Bataan Death March. I wonder whether he looked to him as a model for determination and fortitude.

My dad was 6 when he started selling pan de sal he could not afford and 15 years later, he graduated from the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy where his yearbook caricature was of him, trying to drive a nail into a 4×6 with his bare hands, after the hammer’s head had broken off.

My papa still loves the animated bulldogs Spike and Tyke for the soft-hearted father’s relationship with his son. It’s funny to me, then, that he ended up, instead, with four daughters whose I don’t know how many Fiddler on the Roof’s “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”  living room performances he’s had to sit through.

Raising four girls 

Of his fate, my father often gets the comment, “Don’t you wish you had at least one son?” They think he’s missing out on sports, shaving lessons, and bonding with their barber.

Their fears are unfounded.

My dad taught me how to swim and ride my dirt bike. He didn’t teach us how to shave but we do use his razors.

When my kid sister was 5, she told him that she wanted hair just like his, so, before my mom woke up, he took her to his barber, who lopped off about 4 inches. We call him “kuya” as a joke.

Our house is loud with laughter, with our quoting a Peter Sellers movie or repeating a favorite scatalogical joke. At 10, I had three teeth extracted at one time.

My mouth was filled with bloody gauze, and he bought me a couple cheeseburgers – you know, to make me feel better.

We have a good time.

This Father’s Day weekend, I think about the stories about risk-taking and marriage that he explicitly taught us (“I have the courage to discover and to try because your mother has always been here, with me.”) They were repeated often at the dinner table or hanging on our bedroom walls, framed pictures of hot-air balloons and Martha Graham. Because of our shoulders that shake when we laugh and our posture, which are identical to his, we are, as our parents’ friends tell us, “his carbon copies.”

Dad’s girls 

While it’s a compliment to hear we are similar to him, for me, one of the most salient lessons about parenthood was left unsaid. From him, I learned that I not only did not have to follow in his deep footsteps, but that he had shaped his life so I wouldn’t and shouldn’t have to.

He tells my sisters and me that we can do whatever we want – counsel which we’ve taken literally. I think about him with my sisters and me, 36, 34, 30, and 21, whose political beliefs and sartorial tastes are often quite different from his.

He has had the same classic hairstyle since he was 22, while his daughters have their septums pierced and their backs inked. As teenagers, we’d ask him to guess whether an article of clothing was a headband, a tube top, or a skirt. When my sisters and I were old enough to start dating, he never made the old joke about having a shovel in the backyard when our boyfriends met him. Only a year later did he say about my one of my exes, “Parang sirang kamote” (He was like a rotten sweet potato. You only found out it was bad after you sliced it.).

I think about how he supported my desire (and later, my sisters’, too) to study in the US. The last time he was in the US was in the ‘70s when he was still working as a merchant marine engineer and we have no family here.

His friends asked whether he was worried about us. What must it like to be him, who says goodbye to his children regularly at NAIA, separated again and again by 12 time zones?

We have made choices that I’m pretty sure he would not have wanted for himself. At 19, for example, I declared a major in film because my former dream was to make Filipino safe sex commercials someday, but he applauded my decision, anyway.

In Canto 27 of Dante’s Purgatorio, Virgil, Dante’s paternal figure and guide, says, “My son and art come to a part where of myself I discern no further/Take henceforth thy pleasure for guide,” before he crowns and miters him. He tells Dante that he can go no farther and further, that he has taught him all the “art and science” he knows and now, Dante must let his own happiness and  intelligence help him navigate his way to Paradise.

I cannot quote it without feeling a lump rise behind my sternum. I think of my papa, who gave his daughters the freedom to move away from him, geographically and philosophically, to become fluent in a language and culture that are not his own.

This freedom is gorgeous and its vastness leaves me breathless sometimes and, honestly, sometimes it can be overwhelming. It can be scary.

But, then I remember my dad.

Before I left my home in Saudi at 15 years old for the US, my titos and titas stopped by our house to say, “Don’t change. Be good. Be careful.”

My father, in contrast, embraced me and whispered, “Be happy. Be brave.”

Then he saluted me as my cab pulled out of our driveway. – Rappler.com 

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